What’s next in design for development?

Barely a day goes past without a new pronouncement
about the importance of design thinking, human centred design, or variations
thereupon, for international development and humanitarian work.

What does this actually mean in practice? According
to an excellent
overview by
Geoff Mulgan, CEO of Nesta, design thinking in the
social and public sectors involves the following five aspects:

User focus: designers use ethnographically informed tools to better understand the perspectives those who will be at the receiving end of products and services.

Creative problem solving: design thinkers often come armed with a suite of tools and methods that can help them develop more novel and radical solutions to longstanding problems

Rapid prototyping – the notion of applying ideas quickly, failing and iterating underpins many different aspects of the new wave of development. This can apply to actual physical products (enabled by 3D printing and related technologies) through to fast creation and testing of new systems, services or reforms.

Visualisation – design thinking often uses highly visual ways of framing problems and solutions, which ‘can have a surprising impact in cultures dominated by blocks of prose and the occasional data chart.’ (sound familiar?)

Systems thinking - designers have started to draw on and adopt ideas from complex systems approaches, to identify root causes and asking the right questions to navigate complexity rather than dismissing it.

Mulgan also usefully sets out some common
complaints about design thinking:

high cost of experts

lack of long term engagement with
complex issues

a focus on creative generation ideas not being matched by
intelligent approaches to, or interest in, implementation

weaknesses in how designers themselves learn: ‘eloquent on why other fields and disciplines need
them, but not so good at recognising what they might need to learn from
others.’

"Meeting
people where they are and really taking their needs and feedback into account.
When you let people participate in the design process, you find that they often
have ingenious ideas about what would really help them. And it’s not a onetime
thing; it’s an iterative process."

Others see the design for development
movement more pragmatically: that it has some uses but is no silver bullet, and
comes with many costs and risks that need to be understood and navigated.

And, of course, a large number remain
unconvinced. As one jaded NGO colleague asked me recently, ‘so design thinkers
are basically expensive consultants with more stylish spectacles?’ Less facetiously,
there remain serious concerns about whether the skills needed to develop new
apps or products for the commercial market (and often the elite end of those markets) can meaningfully address political
and social challenges of extreme poverty, inequality and marginalisation.

The partial counter to this is that there
is some serious reflection underway by leading exponents and influential
analysts from the design and innovation establishment. Last week, Tim
Brown, the British CEO of the influential global design firm IDEO, published an
article on the new frontiers of design thinking. In it he argued that
applying human-centered design to
the sectors that need it most - education, government, healthcare, development
– demands some cultural shifts in the design community. In particular, he
described design as needing to address silos within its own practices, to take
on a more interdisciplinary and collaborative approach, and engage more with
complex, ill-defined problems than simple, readily solvable ones.

Last year Panthea Lee, principal at Reboot,
and one of the most thoughtful design thinkers working in international
development wrote
an excellent piece on the need for humility in design approaches. In a
memorable turn of phrase, she suggested many design thinkers are ‘facing ocean-sized
problems armed with teaspoons’, and therefore risk falling short of its promise. The
solution is for designers to ‘get involved in messy policy and political
debates, and to go head-to-head with organisations and interests that would
prefer we didn’t ask the tough questions’.

Strengthening design
for development and humanitarian work

My own work as part of the global Design Thinkers network,
looking at issues from large scale infrastructure to blood donorship, as well
as the growing
body of case studies of projects funded by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund
(which I chair), makes me believe that there is considerable value in
human-centered design, but it needs to be tapped and channeled effectively to
make a meaningful contribution to development and humanitarian work. In the Nesta piece quoted
earlier, Mulgan argues that three things are needed for design to contribute to
public and social goals: design that is grounded in political, social and
cultural contexts; designers who have multidisciplinary skills; and better
methods go full cycle from idea generation through to implementation.

I would agree with all of this, but would also call for three additional changes
and improvements for strengthening ‘design for development’ efforts.

1. More evidence on how design thinking is applied in different
settings, and what the costs and benefits are. Sadly, serious research on the benefits or costs of human-centred design
approaches is thin on the ground. I found a lengthy and very optimistic report by
the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor on human-centred
design for financial inclusion that noted in passing that human-centered
design was not a silver bullet and could be very expensive.

2. Explore more fully the creative and radical possibilities
of design approaches. I think there needs to be more conscious
efforts to pursue the possibilities for design to inform radically new and
challenging practices, norms, behaviours and attitudes. At the moment, too much
design is focused on the development equivalents of Henry Ford’s ‘faster
horse’: making incremental changes to development and humanitarian work, within
the confines of existing business models and assumptions..There is a old joke
about designers that is relevant here:

Q: How many
designers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Why does it have to be a lightbulb?

While this is often used in a derogatory
fashion, I actually think it points to the potential power of design in
development and humanitarian work: helping to redefinequestions; identify underlying
problems; question assumptions; make new conceptual and practical
connections, and open up creative possibilities.

3. New ways of building and democratizing design capabilities and skills
– both within organisations, but also within the
communities we seek to support. As with many other new areas, we have sought to bring in outside skills to suppot design, and in the process, the simple and usable set of ideas has taken on an almost mystical and arcane air.

Without building design skills and capabilities within
development and humanitarian organisations, and making design part of everyday conversation and decisions, we risk simply grafting - at
considerable cost - sticking plasters of creativity onto an otherwise routine
and conservative sector.

And we clearly need to tap into the considerable
ingenuity and creativity within the communities we seek to help. Otherwise we
risk defining their lives only in terms of needs and gaps, and not in terms of
opportunities and potential. Perhaps most importantly,
we need to work on the principle that their
designs matter the most for achieving meaningful change in their lives. Now
that really would be ‘design for development’.